Training to Win Amidst Chronic Disease Step 2 - educate educate educate

On Stitcher alone, I logged 2,698 hours from listening to (mostly)health related podcasts between September of this year and October of 2018 when I downloaded the app.

What would you say is our country’s biggest health issue that isn’t material or emotional? Our sense of security and entitlement in outsourcing and automation of our health.

Trust that you don’t need to learn to take care of yourself because we have people for that. Trust that someone needs to hold any particular license or title or their word is not worth your time. Trust that your health is only worth what other people are willing to pay for it.

An addictive tendency to take the easiest offering without question. Believing the easiest way is what you already know, from the microcosm of the prefabricated worldview that has been handed to you.

We fear even hearing the words coming from someone’s mouth who stands for something outside of our experience. We don’t even get to the point where we hear enough to know if we agree or disagree.

How do we begin to build our own opinions??? Always start with free and easy. Since I began listening to podcasts, it has always been about health, human performance, and personal development. I have assumed the above numbers to be slightly higher than the hours per year I logged between 2014 when I discovered podcasts, and 2017 when I began graduate school. Both my thirst for understanding and my hunger for real, pertinent, wholesome information grew larger as the reality hit many of my classmates and I that the quality of our 25-30 credit hours per quarter of doctorate education was seriously lacking.

Unfortunately my personal modest increase in self-education also showed that I became more reliant on ‘digital relationships’ with podcast hosts as friends and mentors of my inner circle as I became more socially isolated and driven further from real life relationships as disease progressed. Some of me feels shameful about this, while in all actuality it served a couple very important purposes in what would have been an otherwise very quiet and lonely existence.

On top of standing in for being surrounded by good company, 6+ years of dedicated listenership while driving, training, making coffee, cooking, and later during class lectures to tune out the noise, has accumulated into more contact hours with world class performers and in learning about human health and disease than you would have upon graduating with a Phd. And it came from an array of influences more diverse than any other you’ll find elsewhere. You want to burst outside your echo-chamber? Change your playlist to things you are supposed to disagree with at the click of a button. Just experiment. If you still disagree after a few hundred hours on the virtues of veganism, crossfit, carnivore, trail running, or barbell training, just unsubscribe. No one has to know. I like to say I have gained a Phd in common sense😅. Same thing with health and dis-ease. You find yourself in physical, professional, sociological, or emotional trouble? Theres a free resource for that.

Now Stitcher has been shitty with bugs for over a year so I go back and forth. Meaning this picture isn’t representative of nearly the total listening hours I have logged for these two years. It also doesn’t include audiobooks, paperbacks, or continuing education courses either. Of which there are many.

You don’t need to enroll in college to learn about your health, and frankly I know first hand now that college may be the shittiest place to try anyway. I could give an entire dissertation on why, even now as I remain enrolled and continue building sunk costs into an education I do not believe in. For the sake of efficiency, lets just say our medical education at universities in this country focuses on individual paint strokes, not the themes of the mural. They also study pieces of a mural that was all together horribly outdated from the day of its conception - or rather that their perspective of the human organism was incomplete to the point of being incorrect from the get-go, and they’ve yet to relieve themselves of their stalwart position of inadequacy that’s caused healthcare to be such a mess for all of modern history. Private interests in both the pharmaceutical and agricultural sectors are now what keeps the focus on the wrong artwork, even as true scientific knowledge skyrockets onward... Making medical textbooks and the piles of dogshit spilled out of professors mouths onto the floors of lecture halls the world over even more laughably inappropriate, as dreary-eyed, absent minded cohorts of once-optimistic wanna be lifesavers are left none the wiser to their indoctrination. They’re too busy munching away on their Doritos and sipping on their giant flavored coffee-like beverages to try to stay awake as they mosey toward their diplomas of the brainwashing process. Most of their passions will not survive the curriculum. Upon graduation, our education is already outdated by orders of decades, if not millenia.

Allopathic politicized science and medical institutions are looking at the body like its a children’s drawing, while in truth we need to be looking at it with respect to the nuance and intricacies of all details and processes as parts of the timeless masterpiece that the human form is. What befuddles me most is that I can look at the same anatomy, physiology, sociology, orthopedic/ visceral/ ear-nose-throat/ neurological diagnosis, biochemistry, immunology, embryology etc textbooks and gain as clearly the proof for the depth and interconnection of biological systems as the isolationists gain for the sake of treating -and profitting from- independent variables that they claim clinically have nothing to do with one another. They simply can’t see the dotted lines unless they are willing to let you hold their hand to take them along for the ride.

Most aren’t willing. We’re taught that change is scary. Even though the change is and has been right here, in the same space, freely available in the age of information. And that’s where we come in.

Is there a replacement for learning about the body and its parts in their painstaking minutia? No. Despite all my badmouthing it is a fantastic foundation upon which I know all my broader and more applicable know-how is now grounded.

The golden million dollar question however, is whether a person who just wants to learn how to heal themselves should value someone who knows only the minutia, below the practical and systematic, above their own education. I say no. Including me and other holistically minded professionals who are voracious consumers of information. I can’t give you what I have as a singular resource. Even if you pay me for my time for the next three years and just refuse to quit as a client after you yourself have become an expert with your own body’s environment, our experiences and knowledge bases will be different, and yours is more valuable to you.

And you can start for free, and your building of a knowledge base can remain free for a very long time depending on the urgency of your condition of health.

Remember: How do we begin??? Always start with free and easy. Don’t stop until you you know your enemy. Your understanding is more important than anyone else’s opinion.

Tomorrow we dive into step 3 and this one tends to hurt a little sometimes: Spare no Sacrifice! Don’t miss it!